After a long battle, the fish landed on the deck with a thump,
and everyone was happy. He was a beautiful, silvery sailfish, with
a fearsome spear and huge dorsal fin, weighing 30kg. The next day,
he would be served up on a plate, with lemon and olive oil. He was
delicious; he was also one of those fish that grow mysteriously
heavier with posthumous fame.

I was at Tsarabanjina, a private, barefoot island resort of just
25 beachfront wooden bungalows, a boat ride from the commercialism
of Madagascar's best-known tourist spot, the island of Nosy Be off
the north-west coast. By contrast, Tsarabanjina, with its forested
volcanic slopes, ringed by white sands and turquoise waters that
teem with fish edible and decorative, is a paradise indeed. Along
with deep-sea fishing, diving is offered around the Four Brothers -
cave-pitted basalt protrusions from the ocean, and home, above
water, to boobies and frigates. Given such clear waters, I opted to
snorkel, stepping from my gorgeous abode into the blue to swim to
nearby reefs where an iridescent universe awaited.

This island offered my first clue to the beliefs and
superstitions rife in Madagascar. Owing to the presence of a burial
site, Tsarabanjina is considered sacred to the local Sakalava - one
of the country's 18 tribes, each of which has its own customs and
panoply of 'fady' - taboos that you ignore at your peril.
Ancestor-worship is, however, common to all Malagasy, a relic from
the island's early South-East Asian settlers. Among their many
proscriptions: never point at a tomb, lest your fingers drop
off.

Tsarabanjina offers a pampered introduction to a country where,
as David Attenborough once said, 'almost everything… is strange,
weird or, more often than not, almost prehistoric'. I would amply
experience this strangeness at my next stop: the remote south,
domain of the Antandroy ('People-of-the-thorn'). After a flight on
the aptly nicknamed Mad Air to Taolagnaro - known locally as Fort
Dauphin - we lurched for four hours along the Route National 13, a
potholed track frequented by wooden carts drawn by zebu
(hump-backed Asian cattle) and bicycles on to which goats had been
strapped. Occasionally, a packed and rusted taxi-brousse - 'taxi'
being a distant notion for this dilapidated bus - with live
chickens hanging from glassless windows, would splutter past,
churning up clouds of dust.

Mandrare River Camp, set in a gallery forest dominated by huge
tamarind trees, is a wilderness haven. Six comfortable tents are
each mercifully attached to well-plumbed bathrooms, and insulated
by netting from the plentiful wildlife. For Madagascar, the
fourth-largest island in the world, supports the discrete and
complex ecosystem of an entire continent, wherein 80 per cent of
its living species are found nowhere else on earth. Yet, adorable
lemurs and chameleons notwithstanding, tourism last year hovered
around a lowly 255,000, only 8,000 of which was from the UK.

It was all go. A night walk - which revealed bug-eyed,
curly-tailed chameleons, tiny mouse lemurs, woolly lemurs, and
recumbent, so-called sportive lemurs - was followed by an electric
performance of tribal dancing and a succulent dinner of barbecued
zebu beneath a sky plump with stars. I fell asleep, exhausted, to
the melancholy hoot of an owl, and woke to the sounds of singing
from the nearby village. Outside the cocooned comfort of my tent,
the mist rose wispily and, in the cool light of dawn, spiders' webs
carpeting the riverbank glittered as if with a glaze of frost.

Ring-tailed
lemurs are among the most entertaining species that inhabit the
island

By day, we bumped down narrow cactus alleys, and forded the
river to explore sacred forests. The Antandroy, said my guide,
spend 80 per cent of their wealth on their dead. In a spiny forest,
huge ancestral tombs decorated with sacrificial zebu skulls lay
among euphorbias and surreal 'octopus trees' whose 20-metre tall,
spiny 'fingers' beckoned in the breeze. Wedged between two fingers
sat a fluffy ball of snow-white fur, which turned its black snout
to face us: the famous sifaka, known for its graceful arabesques
through the treetops and ungainly gait on the ground. But,
comfortably ensconced among the thorns, he was going nowhere. For
entertainment, the prize went to a group of ring-tailed lemurs,
swinging high in the sun-dappled canopy of a gallery forest, until
a banded hawk sent them scurrying to ground in a flurry of stripes
and unearthly antiphon of alarm.

Six more bone-shaking hours, retracing our steps via Taolagnaro
to the island's south-east coast, led us to Manafiafy, and total
contrast. On a beautiful bay where French colonists landed in 1638,
and next to an Antanosy fishing village that provides Manafiafy
Lodge with spiny lobsters, rock crab and the freshest daily catch,
we were now in coastal rainforest. The highlight was early-morning
boating, through the mirror-still waters of the mangrove swamps.
Mindless of the Nile crocodiles, women waded, trawling for shrimps,
while fishermen paddled through tannin-rich waters, their wooden
pirogues silhouetted against the rising sun. As coucals, sunbirds,
lovebirds, whistling ducks and other native birds trilled their
paean to dawn, one image is indelibly etched in my memory: that of
the Madagascar kingfisher who, having dived for breakfast and
gorged too hastily, sat on his branch... hiccupping.

Ways and meansTeresa Levonian Cole
travelled as a guest of Rainbow Tours, which offers 12 nights in
Madagascar, from £5,295, based on two sharing, including four
nights at Tsarabanjina, three at Mandrare River Camp and three
nights at Manafiafy, all-inclusive, plus two nights in
Antananarivo. There are FCO warnings on travel to some parts of the
island; visit gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice.